If you still want to play the game of American life, then you had better learn to lie. Kneel before false gods. Pretend to care about the ruling class and their illusions. Keep your head down. Pray that no one sees you. Your world is one of endless interruption and constant despair. This is not the future you were promised. What if someone had navigated the chaos of the Twenty-First Century and solved the puzzle of America's blinding and relentless informational assault? And what if they had put that solution into a novel that explained everything? This is Only Americans Burn in Hell, true believer. Rapturously reviewed in the United Kingdom, it's your only guide to 2020 and beyond. Just remember: every suicide needs its note.

Only Americans Burn in Hell

Humor & Entertainment

Kobek, Jarett

Humor

We Heard You Like Books

20 years of life. 27,000 tweets. 171 pages of sympathy for the devil.

Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

Arts & Photography

Music

“A brilliant re-creation of a disappeared New York of cheap rents, club kids and Bret Easton Ellis. . . . You can’t stop time’s passage, this absorbing novel reminds us. You can only find someone to love to help you survive it.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “Have you been pining for tales of drug-fueled big-city debauchery set in the pre-digital era, when MTV was king, people still used landlines and hookups were orchestrated on dance floors instead of dating apps? Look no further.” —The Washington Post “Hard not to recommend. . . . Full of delightfully cynical aphorisms. . . . At the heart of The Future Won’t Be Long is the friendship between Baby and Adeline—at once loving and destructive and convincingly drawn by Kobek.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com A euphoric, provocative novel about friendship, sex, art, clubbing, and ambition set in 1980s and ’90s New York City, from the author of I Hate the Internet When Adeline, a wealthy art student, chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat, the two begin a fiery friendship that propels them through a decade of New York life. In the apartments and bars of downtown Manhattan to the infamous nightclub The Limelight, Adeline is Baby’s guardian angel, introducing him to a city not yet overrun by gentrification. They live through an era of New York punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, and Tompkins Square Park. Adeline is fiercely protective of Baby, even bringing him home with her to Los Angeles, but he soon takes over his own education. Once just a kid off the bus from Wisconsin, Baby relishes ketamine-fueled clubbing nights and acid days in LA, and he falls deep into the Club Kid twilight zone of sexual excess. As Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become and flees to the nascent tech scene in San Francisco, Baby faces his own desire for artistic expression and recognition. He must write his way out of clubbing life, and their friendship, an alliance that seemed nearly impenetrable, is tested and betrayed, leaving each unmoored as the world around them seems to be unraveling. Riotously funny and wise, The Future Won't Be Long is an ecstatic, propulsive novel coursing with a rare vitality, an elegy to New York and to the relationships that have the power to change—and save—our lives.

The Future Won't Be Long: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

VIKING

Penguin??Books

In 1997, the world obtained a grainy video revealing lurid excerpts from honeymooners Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's post-wedding celebration aboard a small yacht. Laying bare the mysteries of their intimate lives, this video became the first spark in a long and culturally supported trend: the leaked celebrity home movie. Aligning criminal histories with transcribed extracts from such broadcasts, If You Won't Read Then Why Should I Write? documents the bathetic moments beyond a publicist's protective shield, while offering a sobering appraisal of American social justice. * Kimmy K at Burger King * The petit shamanism of Miley smoking salvia divinorum * Vince bouncing on a bed.

If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Success and Failure Series)

History & Criticism

Penny-Ante Editions

Bad relationships, interracial dating, cross-faith intermarriage, the endless pangs of monogamous love, reality television, Muslim fundamentalism, Crispin Hellion Glover, Internet pornography, Turkish secularism in the era of Erdoğan, the amorous habits of Thomas Jefferson, errant dogs, cheeseburger tattoos, alcoholics without recovery, 9/11 PTSD, female Victorian novelists, the people who go to California to die. Jarett Kobek's second novel, BTW, presents the tragicomedy of a young man in Los Angeles balancing a lunatic father, two catastrophic relationships, identity politics, and American pop culture at its most confused.

BTW: A Novel (Success and Failure Series)

Humor & Satire

What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women? Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city's gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable. In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves? Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.

I Hate the Internet

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Two decades after its release, the Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version is the rare hip-hop album that sounds as fresh and funny as on the day of its release. With a never-replicated style, the most obscene man in show business rhymed a chronicle of the nastiest thoughts put on record, bringing hip-hop to a place where it could be dirty and stinking.Much beloved and purchased, Return was not only a comedic masterpiece, but also a meditation on the nature of freedom and the power of swearing. By connecting the Ol' Dirty Bastard to a forgotten literary tradition, this book demonstrates that the rapper's artistry contained a profound repudiation of shame, and offered rich themes that have gone unexplored. Taking the ODB beyond the headlines, Jarett Kobek also explores the consequences of the wild tales that provided years of tabloid fare, suggesting that beneath the shock value was a very serious story ignored by almost everyone. A Black man in America refused to acknowledge social control and was crushed by the American criminal justice system. Is it possible that by recording his shameless message, the Ol' Dirty Bastard doomed himself to a short lifetime of police harassment and prison violence?

Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers (33 1/3)

Bloomsbury Academic

A disorienting fictionalized portrayal of 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta and the meaning of madness.
Ours is a century of fear. Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, “rogue states,” jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber.
In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master's thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the “Islamic-Oriental city.” Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history's great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, “The Whitman of Tikrit”―a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein's last day before capture―ATTA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.

ATTA (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)

Semiotext[e]

"A scruffy masterpiece of criminology. It seems to me that either Kobek's painstaking deductions are correct, or we must urgently revise the laws of probability." -Alan Moore, author of From Hell 
Dear Reader, 
This is not the Zodiac speaking. The one thing that I ask of you is this, please read this book. It is called How to Find Zodiac. Being that this book is about the Zodiac, it offers a new suspect. The theory is probably correct. At the moment the theory is unproven. But the idea is a bomb waiting to go massive. Can you see the flaws in the hunting method or will you just agree and say case closed. Either way one thing is true. Zodiac can never look and seem the same after you read this book. It was written by Jarett Kobek.

How to Find Zodiac

Biographies & Memoirs

True Crime

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kobek, Jarett. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kobek, Jarett

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kobek, Jarett. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Only Americans Burn in Hell

Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

The Future Won't Be Long: A Novel

The Future Won't Be Long: A Novel

If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Success and Failure Series)

BTW: A Novel (Success and Failure Series)

I Hate the Internet

Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers (33 1/3)

ATTA (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)

How to Find Zodiac